Malta trip #13 – Malta Nightlife

Dinner time was again challenging, especially as I was bored with Italian. After a lot of browsing, physical and digital, we agreed on an Indian restaurant for tonight. It was a little distance away from the clubbing precinct and was called “Emperor of India”. It was quite popular and we actually had to wait for a table which I hate doing. I would rather go and eat in some other place if one is busy. To me, waiting for a table is a very bourgeois thing to do. I think it comes from my Indian upbringing where you can get great food even in a cheap, roadside restaurant (they are called dhaba’s and even in them some are better than others.)

Our wait was only about 10 minutes though, and we had something to keep us busy. Tell you later about that. When we got our table, I thought I recognised the couple at the next table. I asked them if they were staying in Corinthia. They were. They asked if we were as well and that told me that they were not the people from the swimming pool which I had earlier thought them to be. It was only coincidence that they were staying at Corinthia.

 

They were from Germany, the lady spoke a little more English than the gentleman. I see non-native people and I immediately assume they speak English. So stupid. The gent was from Garmisch in Germany which excited me because I have been there. I opened my blog on my phone and showed him the blog header image. 

 

“This was taken at Garmisch.” I told him.

 

He nodded and let it go. Two days later when I opened my blog I saw that I had changed the blog header image a while back. In my excitement I had not noticed it in the restaurant but the Garmisch image that I kept on my blog for about 15 years had been replaced by a more recent photo from Rohtang Pass in the Himalayas. The German tourist was just too polite to say “Are you shitting me, bro? This ain’t no Garmisch!”

 

Anyway, the food was good as we had hoped. The restaurant owner was also a great character. On the way back, we had to walk through the clubbing area so we decided to stop at one place to have a drink. The amusing thing there was that one of the bouncers at the door asked us for our “Proof of Vaccination”. He had to repeat it four times before I got it even though his pronunciation was perfect because I had never been asked this at a club in my life and I am too old to be id’ed. In some malls, we had had occasion that someone pointed something at us. After my first shocked step-back, I realised it was a thermometer. But this was the first time after the airport that anyone asked for our PoV.

 

Both of us opened the NHS app on our phones to show the NHS Pass as proof of vaccination but the signal wasn’t good and the app just kept showing the spinner. After a while he just said thank you and let us in. We do have trustworthy faces, Roberta and I.

 

As for the drink inside the less said the better. The drinks were not great and the party was kind of DOA. The drinks were not overpriced if you assume that they would have alcohol. We finished the drinks and came back to the hotel. Admittedly, it was Sunday night but in a tourist place like Malta I had expected it to have more of a buzz.

 

Our main topic of conversation this evening was the arrangements for return travel. We had our flights booked but there were other arrangement that needed to be made in view of the Covid-19 pandemic.  The UK government had set requirements that everybody coming in had to take a Covid-19 test within 0-2 days of arrival. The way they were enforcing that was to make all passengers book a test online with a test provider company, get a booking reference and enter that booking reference in a “Passenger Locator Form”. Remember, we had to fill a similar form for travelling to Malta? It was the same going back with his additional wrinkle. I sorted out my test booking and form at night, Roberta did hers the next morning in the taxi. I chose to have my test kit sent to my home.

 

Apropos nothing, one thing I hate is the hotel hand wash soap. This was a 5-star hotel but this practice never changes. They always give you this round bar (circle?) of soap which you put in a soap dish and use it every time you need to wash your hands. It always smells horrible, always makes your skin dry and the worst thing is that it gets disgustingly wet and melty. Why can’t they put a small bottle of liquid handwash there? This time with the pandemic still a concern, the hotel toiletries included two tiny bottles of sanitizer. I am sure they can do the same for liquid handwash in a way that’s cost-effective, if they want. I was carrying my own sanitizer and sanitising wipes but I still swiped those tiny bottles because they were perfect for bringing through airport security.

 

The next day we were planning to check-out and see the city before going to the airport so I made sure to put all my devices on charge before going to bed. I also made sure all my media was backed up including this morning’s great sunrise photos. Then I went to bed to dream of Covid-19 tests. Just kidding, my dreams are more cinematic.

Malta Trip - Why Malta?

[Photo courtesy: me. Real photo taken from my camera on this trip.] 

I will be honest, Malta was not high on my list of places to visit and I didn't know much about it except that there is a fruit by the same name. But just about the time when I was feeling cabin fever from not having done any travel since December 2019, my friend Roberta was making a travel plan to Malta. She is great at planning such trips and my last trip in December 2019 was also with her to Copenhagen for the Christmas markets. Since she was planning the trip it gave me an incentive to look up Malta. 

For those whose geography is as bad as mine, Malta is an archipelago, which means a group of islands, in the Mediterranean sea. Roberta had chosen it after her own research which showed that this was one of the rare places in Europe that still had sunshine and warm weather in November. I had very few leave days left because I had taken most of them for my studies earlier this year so I told Roberta that I would like to tag along but I could only go for 5 days including a weekend. She agreed to that. We both regretted that later because...you will see. 

Travelling in 2021 has its own hassles and one of my main reasons for not travelling even after lockdown opened was that I didn't want to wear a mask on my travels and I didn't want to take photos of people in masks. But I give some of the blame to my friend Ania who had recently travelled to London and some blame to myself for staying too cooped up during lockdown until it became too depressing. In the words of Anais Nin 

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”

So, I took the hassles. Malta was one of the few countries that was accepting UK visitors. But the condition was that you had to be fully vaccinated and bring evidence of it. The evidence in our case was to get the NHS app on the smartphone and get the "NHS Pass". I had to jump through so many hoops to prove my identity before I got the Pass. But I got it. You can save it on your phone as a PDF file or print it out. Both are acceptable at the airport. We also had to fill out a Passenger Locator Form on the Malta govt. website. Again, we could keep it as a PDF on the phone to show when asked. 

Roberta is an expert in finding cheap flights and accommodation so I left those details to her and only insisted on one thing - advance seat booking in the front part of the plane. In case you don't know, the front seats get less turbulence in the plane. My research had warned me that Malta being an island gets a lot of winds and the landing can be a bit shaky. I am a coward when it comes to turbulence, and other things. You will see.